The Internet has made available myriad of services and information. When customers search and find the desired information, it is becoming commonplace for the associated vendor website to provide an address to a local store and a link to a mapping service will show locations of businesses that sell the products or services locally. Additionally, the user can select to obtain directions from the user location to one of the local business locations using the mapping service.
Existing solutions such as these are functional but require more time and effort on the part of the user because of the conventional need of the mapping service have the starting location (or origin address). In many situations, the user is somewhat familiar with at least a part of the route; thus, detailed instructions for directions for the entire route to the destination are not necessary.
Another shortcoming of conventional mapping systems involves the situation where the origin (or starting point) is unknown or cannot be precisely determined. An example of this is an invitation to a business party in a city that the user is visiting. In many cases, the user may not readily know the originating address (e.g., if stopping in a cyber café). Thus, existing solutions require the manual crafting of a multi-approach map, which is resource consuming and cannot be readily scaled.